By Dan Meyers
In Ivoirian French, on est ensemble is a way to express solidarity (literally, we are together), to assure that a solution to a problem will be found, or, most interestingly, as a non-answer (A: “Did you drink my passionfruit juice?” B: “On est ensemble”). My magic 8-ball brain has lately been popping up the semi-sensical phrase “Alone est ensemble” as my fortune with worrying frequency. I am living alone in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, which might strike you as interesting but really turns out to be pretty prosaic most of the time. As I sit alone (with eight bored-to-death teenage baristas in an empty coffee shop) and write this, I come back to that same 8-ball message. I think I’m feeling alone so acutely because the warm blanket of cultural novelty is starting to wear off after being here for 9 months – the low hanging fruit of learning how life works, what people think, history, languages, food, music…there’s still an unfathomable amount to learn, but I’m at the stage where it feels like I have to get creative in my conversations with people to stumble on something new (a recent favorite: the stately, bloodsoaked Hotel Ivoire’s conference center was once Africa’s only ice skating rink in its former life. I saw a picture, and it was striking, the 70s bellbottoms and afros weaving through the ultimate Ivoirian luxury, a carpet of frost protected from the sun).
I’m working from home, slithering through emails in a two room apartment overlooking a vacant lot that once hosted a thriving ecosystem of purple and orange kingfishers perched from the bones of a failed building, kids smoking weed, and drunks pissing urine, but which has since been groomed flat and left to transform into a building full of furnished, extended-stay apartments, which are doing to Abidjan what Airbnb has done to New Orleans. I travel upcountry a bit, but the stretches in Abidjan hammer home my isolation. I typically walk when I don’t know what else to do, through the manicured rows of villas in Cocody, the fishmonger rows on the lagoon in Treichville, the anywhere bars on the sidewalks everywhere, plastic chairs and stale beer sunning themselves in the drooling mouth of the afternoon. I’d like to say that I do a lot of my best thinking on these walks, but I’ve realized that I’m a crummy thinker – given a vacuum, my brain will vulture over the remnants of old conversations or turn trite realizations into mantras that evaporate the second I’m back in the walled garden of my iPhone. Recently, though, on such a hoof, I was thinking of a line in a poem that I liked: “Cities are where people trade boredom for fear”. Its a hell of a line, but I don’t think it’s true. Cities are where people go to be alone together. I spent a lot of nights at a little restaurant in my neighborhood, where the clientele consists almost invariably of single men or men cheating on their wives. We sit in long rows over plates of rice and smoked fish stew, watching soccer, drinking wine and palm whiskey, eavesdropping on each other’s conversations. The two cops responsible for the afternoon traffic jams in the 30eme arrondisement are there, as are the builders of the new Chinese business center across the street. We’re all here to be mothered by the lady of the house, Nadege, who sits with us and jokes and tells stories. At 7 PM sharp, an old man in a beautiful printed pantsuit arrives, greets us like a senator on campaign, and glides back to an air conditioned back room to drink his white wine in peace. When I’m there, 15 minutes or so after he arrives, he sends Nadege out to bring me to him. The first time I met him, he insisted that I call him Monsieur le Colonel-Majeur. The second time I met him, he scolded me for being so formal and insisted that I call him Papy. Papy is known for making people uncomfortable, bragging about his son living in Italy, and going on poisonous rants against Malinké people. He carries a short cane with a blade inside, which he claims is German-made and edged in poison. He loves to tell me that he doesn’t need anyone, that he keeps to himself and relishes the fact that he has had kids with four different women. He once went on an exchange with the Reagan-era Army Rangers in Texas, and he has a genuine whistfulness on his handsome patrician face when he talks about violence. When he leaves, I loiter with Nadege, peppering her with questions to avoid significant silences (she calls me the journalist, not very approvingly) before I stumble home to dream next to my computer.
Abidjan is one of the wealthiest cities in West Africa, meaning a small percentage of the Ivoirian population (and a couple of gilded French and Lebanese enclaves) lives sumptuously, dripping with cocoa, rubber, or palm oil wealth, while most of the city’s 7 million inhabitants press on under rising housing, food, and transportation prices. Its a city that’s rapidly breaking the communal ties that people have when they come to the city from the countryside, usually from closeknit families speaking over 60 different languages, all tied together by “joke alliances” that let people tease others of certain ethnicities without anyone taking it too seriously. People with money are often leaving behind situations where they or their parents slept six, seven to a room, where there was no privacy, where differing with your elders earns you a threat to “break the yam” that holds your family together. This togetherness has given young people, since the 90s at least, a romanticization of independence that you hear in pop hits like Espoir 2000’s Je t’aime, which includes the lines “if you see two people in love, leave them alone” and “if your husband has to please your mother, he’s no longer your husband, but your mother’s” – young lovers on the run from overbearing families, Romeo and Juliet. And yet, the fabric of togetherness is strung like the jazzy lights of an overpriced haut-concept food court over the city. The roads are chalk-full on weekends for weddings, baptisms, and funerals. For regional association meetings, neighborhood soccer matches, school reunions…
Globalization continues to corrode those ties, though, for better and for worse. Friends live in their own apartments for the first time in their family’s histories, Easter trips to hometowns get pushed off indefinitely, city kids grow up learning French but not their parent’s maternal languages…a proliferation of choice, of rich kids opting to take the private orange taxis home instead of our commune’s battered, yellow share-taxis, flitting around the city on what seem to me to be invisible axes, with stops in front lawns, beneath pharmacy banners, on routes that every self-respecting Abidjanais knows by heart. Something else that escapes me, I guess.
I was sick last week, I’m often sick, and I lay dripping on the rubber mattress while ice and fire danced on my cells. I had a fever dream. I’d been watching this Swedish detective drama, where the protagonist lets everyone around him down while being shy and handsome and punching the wall in his apartment. In the dream, Agent Kurt Wallender was cruising the alleys, looking for me in between the clotheslines and the mango stands, hoping to serve me with some kind of summons to account for my inability to make many new friends across linguistic and cultural barriers. I kept thinking of putting my shoes on, to duck into the corner store downstairs and hide behind the mounds of rice while he raged his way uptown. I finally woke up and dragged my ass downstairs to find a taxi (private) to go get covid tested. In the doorway of my building, M. Serge. Where are you going? You feeling ok? How’s the family? I felt like I looked like “The Scream””, and I muttered an excuse to that effect. Next Salif, the chicken salesman. A few phrases exchanged in Dioula, as I sweat into the gutters. Finally, I’m negotiating a taxi ride downtown. “Hey, whitey!” A smiling face: M. Oumar, the gallant propriétaire of my omelette stand, tickled with himself for the shocked look on my face. He frowns at my gaunt mug and mutters that, damn, he’d see me tomorrow he guessed. As a particularly disinterested health worker probed my nostrils for love letters from SARS-COV-2, I was feeling guilty about sneaking through the neighborhood when everyone had tried to engage me in conversation. I felt emptied out by the shallowness of my interactions and the grace with which my neighbors moved through them.
But that same night, I felt better. I ate ginger grilled chicken and danced with friends. The cycle of being elated by human connection and certainty that I was utterly alone started over again. And while its true that I sometimes relish being lonely, I will never get used to being alone. Being here can make me feel that everyone I care about is somewhere out there waiting for me to come back – that I’ll regale rooms full of old friends with stories for the next five years on my book tour (I’m coming for you, Topeka!). More often, though, I realize that I’m only really in touch with four or five people, while most of my friendships bleed into formality and strained catchups. And that on some level, I am here to avoid being known in the first place.
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